Energy is the lifeblood of civilization. Without access to affordable and clean energy sources, civilizations struggle to advance their modern societies. While advances in the areas of clean energy generation have been prevalent in the past few decades, advances in energy storage technologies have not been as prevalent, and are woefully inadequate in terms of cost and performance. This presents a particularly acute problem because most clean energy generation technologies are periodic in nature. For example, the output from solar farms occurs only during the day. By way of another example, the output from wind farms is somewhat unpredictable due to changes in weather patterns. Because of the uneven generation schedules, the energy must be stored for later use, or otherwise wasted.
Even with the latest advances in chemical battery technologies, such storage technology still remains prohibitively expensive and impractical—particularly on a large scale, and also have the disadvantage that they consume new raw materials to produce new battery units. Moreover, the relatively short life expectancy of conventional chemical batteries means that businesses must often allocate additional capital to the repair or replacement of large battery installations.
Today, approximately ⅔ of the energy sources used to generate electricity in the U.S. are fossil-fuel based. Burning fossil fuels to generate electricity emits CO2 into the atmosphere. Scientific research indicates that the increasing CO2 content in the atmosphere due to burning fossil fuels is changing the atmospheric weather on Earth. Public policy in the U.S. and world-wide is increasingly focusing on lowering and ultimately eliminating CO2 emissions. One approach to minimizing CO2 emissions is to replace fossil fuels sources with renewable, intermittent or cyclical, low-carbon energy sources such as solar photovoltaic, wind, ocean wave, lake wave, ocean tide, lake current, river current, or the like.
Fossil fuels enable near on-demand generation of electricity: when demand is higher, more fossil fuels are burned in a power plant to increase the amount of electricity being burned. But electricity consumption is intermittent, cyclical, and seasonal. The demand for electricity is largely decoupled from the natural processes that give rise to the intermittent and cyclical nature of the availability of some renewable energy sources. It is common for wind energy to vary from a minimum of near zero to a typical maximum over a typical period on the order of days to a week. The intensity of sunlight at a location varies strongly with the time of day, season, weather, air clarity, and so forth. Oceanic wave energies vary on the hourly to monthly timescales. Oceanic tidal energies range from a typical minimum to a typical maximum approximately twice daily.
Accordingly, a need remains for improved methods and systems for storing energy on a massive scale. Embodiments of the invention address these and other limitations in the prior art.
The foregoing and other features of the various embodiments of the inventive concept will become more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.